I am interested in how children acquire the syntax and semantics of their first language. My research aims to understand the developmental trajectory of language acquisition: at each step of linguistic development, children have access only to a limited set of data about their language, consisting of the portions of adult speech that they are able to parse with the grammatical knowledge that they have developed so far. How do children leverage their linguistic knowledge in order to learn from this partial data?

Currently, I am looking at how children acquiring new verbs exploit relationships between a verb's syntax and its semantics, and how children use their knowledge about verb argument structure to acquire more complex constructions, such as filler-gap dependencies. I'm investigating these questions using a combination of psycholinguistic experimental methods (preferential looking, habituation-switch), computational modelling, and linguistic typology.

Collaborators:

Jeffrey Lidz (Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park)

Alexander Williams (Linguistics and Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park)

Naomi Feldman (Linguistics and UMIACS, University of Maryland, College Park)

Maria Polinsky (Language Science Center and Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park)